Crafting is… weird, in TSW, but actually quite useful and apparently built for the long term. No huge guide here because it’s actually not that complicated.
– The above-mentioned “Moose” has a kind of crafting mission found on the table near him, to disassemble a shotgun and make a weapon with the parts.
– The Raven’s Knock (Madame Roget’s place) also offers a crafting mission which enables you to learn how to make glyphs (gear add-ons – think WoW’s enchantments). Sadly you can only make a Chaos focus I think, but I could be wrong.
Here are the Basics According to Ysh:
i. Disassembly and learning shapes
You can disassemble most items you outgrow or loot, and I would recommend it. To disassemble an item, open the crafting interface (Y) and drag the item in question from your inventory to the “Item” part of the crafting window. This has two results:
– It will break down the item into its base parts and return crafting ingredients
– It will also show you the “shape” of the item in the assembly window.
The second part is worth knowing, because to MAKE items you have to place crafting ingredients in the assembly window to form the correct “shape” (i.e. recipe) for the item. If you want to make a Shotgun or a Belt but have no idea what shape you need to use, drag a similar item to the disassembly slot and make note of the resulting shape without actually disassembling it. Drag it back out to your inventory and Bob’s your recipe uncle.
ii. Obtaining actual crafting materials
You can disassemble items to get mats and you can loot them. The draug in Kingsmouth seem to drop a fair number of runes, for instance, whereas I’ve never had a rune from disassembly yet (just the ‘elements’ – fire, water, dust and metal).
As far as I’ve seen, disassembly only returns “base” materials, but that may likely change later in the game. Most crafted items require base materials to be refined into more usable stuff before you can craft with them. Qualities are, but don’t quote me: Base –> Imperfect –> Normal –> Sacred –> Pure. QL3 weapons can be made with Imperfect stuff, so it won’t be too hard to find what you need.
Materials can be improved by refining them in the crafting window: pop them in the assembly area and you’ll get 1 material of the next quality level for every 5 you put in. So 5 base [whatevers] make 1 imperfect, 5 imperfects will make 1 normal, and so on. My guess is it’s designed to suck down a whole lot of resources, which is mudflation-prevention in action. It works.
iii. Making something
Yesterday I decided to use one of my QL3 weapon kits I got to see if I could improve on my Blood magic focus. Knowing I’d need metal to make it (all weapons seem to need metal) and knowing I’d need 7 bits of Imperfect metal to make my focus, I collected 35 base metals and refined those down to 7. Then I dragged my QL3 Weapon Crafting Toolkit (I think it’s a mission reward) into the Tool section of the crafting window, added my 7 imperfect metals in the required shape, and hey presto.
It’s not THAT much better that what I’ve got, but I can improve it with glyphs until I can afford the Council of Venice one / get one from a mission or drop / or get one from Polaris. Every little helps.
And finally, the biggest crafting tip of all
I can’t swear to it but I think Scopique passed this one on to me:
To add stacked crafting resources to the crafting interface without having to laboriously split them up by hand (THE single most nerdrage inducing thing about TSW crafting), left-click to pick up the stack from your inventory then right-click in each square you need in the crafting interface. And suddenly crafting isn’t so much of a nightmare.
Stylish Corpse 
Glyphs will disassemble into runes: which makes sense, that’s what you build glyphs with in the first place. They form a diamond shape of four runes.
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The quality of material that disassembly yields will change according to the quality of the item being disassembled. That’s a tiny bit misleading though, because you’ll actually get materials slightly weaker than appropriate for the item in question.
So for instance… to make a Q10 item you’ll need the pure version of whatever material you’re using. But if you disassemble it immediately after you assemble it, you’ll get sacred-quality mats.
In practice, it’s pretty straightforward; through the early stages of the game, I just used anything that was better than what I had on, and disassembled everything else. By the time one hits Egypt, it’s common to start thinking about multiple roles and approaches, so people often start collecting 3 sets of gear: dps/heal/tank. You’ll still have plenty to disassemble, of course; you’ll just go through a brief period of inventory expansion if/when you decide to start carrying extra gear sets.
Incidentally, most soloists prefer a mixture of gear types. If you go all offense, you can find yourself being smacked around by a lot of foes; if you go all healing, you might find that fights take a really, really long time, and so on. So e.g. on my solo Blades/Blood build I usually wear two pieces of healing gear (head slot and one major), with dps gear in all other slots. That lets me keep my shields up and keep myself healed, while still doing a lot of damage.
Runes/glyphs start dropping around SC or BM as I recall. Gadgets drop from Egypt on. Signets only drop in Transylvania. That’s all anecdotal though; it’s close to correct if not precisely correct. 😉
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Thank you for curing my crafting nerd-rage with that last tip. I can’t tell you how much you’ve lowered my stress level with numbers, but – thankyouthankyouthankyou.
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Agreed, that one I did not know about – really useful tip, thank you 🙂
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Don’t thank me, thank Scopique — THE most useful crafting tip ever. You have no idea how many stacks I broke up by hand during beta, /Muttley-grumbling to myself the whole time.
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Great great post. Thanks for the tips.
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Note that crafted green gear is better than mission reward green gear. But, the toolkits being so rare kind of ruins crafting. It would be a useful tool during leveling except the path of least resistance is just do a few dungeons and you will never be able to beat that gear with crafted gear. Similarly crafting would be useful to bridge the gap between Egypt sequin items and QL10 purples. Right now you can’t upgrade your weapons at all doing solo content in Transylvania after finishing Egypt and buying sequin weapons there. You will swim in green QL10 crafting kits but they won’t make better items than what you have. So you can go do dungeons, or there’s a huge gap until you get purples from PVP, and if you like neither dungeons nor pvp, you’re done with gear progression using mostly QL8-10 greens.
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